Christians and Christ

Earlier this month, George Bush was reelected president of the United States. To many, his reelection came as a bitter disappointment and, what is more, a shocking surprise. The president, after all, had completely turned his back on his promise to act as a bipartisan "healer." He had violated the fundamental conservative tenet of fiscal responsibility by allowing the country to amass a huge budget deficit. He presided over an uncertain economy. He had led the country into a controversial war by means that called into question his competence if not his probity. The last weeks of the campaign brought for the Republicans an unrelieved monotony of bad news.

Overcoming such apparently serious disadvantages, he won, and decisively. A major factor was the strong support of large numbers of voting "evangelicals" who apparently approved the president's perceived Christian "values" and/or who worried about John Kerry's "values" or supposed lack of them. The pundits threw up their hands and asked "Who knew?" The answer is: "Almost anybody who lives in a zip code that is neither very high nor very low knew."

If the burden of my last column was that the Democrats ought to take Christians seriously, the burden of this one is that Christians ought to take Christ seriously. A recent, understated news report estimates that, so far, 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the war. That is a statistic that should outrage every Christian sensibility in the country. Hence, I very much hope that the evangelical electorate will now press hard for an evangelical agenda.

The word "evangelical" actually means "of or pertaining to the gospel" (evangelium in Latin). The two issues advertised by the secular press as being of most burning urgency to evangelicals, abortion and "gay marriage," are thus not strictly speaking evangelical. Concerning abortion, there is a very ancient and powerful consensus in Christian theology. It cannot simply be ignored, but there is nothing about abortion in the gospels. Matrimony is one of the seven sacraments and antedates the English language. It is by definition the union of a man and a woman. But of course there is nothing about gay anything in the gospels. Jesus says absolutely nothing about homosexuality and very little about heterosexuality. He was a Jew and did disapprove of adultery, but in his famously recorded encounter with an actual adulterer, he forgave her and challenged the self-righteousness of her accusers.

Still, Christians seeking political guidance in the gospels can find it, as American evangelicals of such different moral temperaments as John Brown and Martin Luther King did. Facing his own unjust execution, Jesus refused to resist, saying, "My kingdom is not of this world." The Emperor Constantine refused to believe him, with fairly disastrous results. Though Jesus talked little about sex, he talked a lot about money. I estimate that at least half of his parables are about getting and spending. His consistent teaching was that the possession of wealth was morally dangerous and corrupting, that moral perfection demanded that the rich give what they have to the poor, and that the poor were particularly "blessed" in the eyes of God. Around these teachings Francis of Assisi, the most famous evangelical and the most admired Christian in all of history, founded a powerful movement.

Bible-believing Christians must know that Jesus reduced the entire moral law to two propositions: love of God and love of neighbor. But many evangelicals also believe in hell, an eschatological place of torment reserved for violators of the moral law. They must surely have a special interest in the 25th chapter of Matthew, the evangelical site where Jesus most clearly says who is going to be in hell: to wit, those who do not feed the hungry, who do not clothe the naked, who do not tend to the sick, who do not comfort prisoners and who do not welcome strangers. The evangelical agenda here implied was in the Middle Ages catalogued among the "Works of Corporal Mercy." In modern terms, an evangelical agenda would include the permanent abolition of poverty, prison reform, health-care reform and immigration reform. The agenda cannot of course define specific structures or policies. There are doubtless many possible effective structures and policies, but the evangelical imperatives guiding them are nonnegotiable: love of neighbor and a dramatic reduction in the gap between rich and poor. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.